“Let cynics prattle as they may, our existence here, without the presence of the other sex, would be only a dark and cheerless void.” Which “other sex?” Don’t be so obscure. Dr. Beecher says, “that a writer’s ideas should stand out like rabbits’ ears, so that the reader can get hold of them.” If you allude to the female sex, I don’t subscribe to it. I wish they were all “translated.” If there is anything that gives me the sensations of a landsman on his first sea voyage, it is the sight of a bonnet. Think of female friendship! Two women joining the Mutual Admiration Society; emptying their budget of love affairs; comparing bait to entrap victims; sighing over the same rose leaf; sonnetizing the same moonbeam; patronizing the same milliner, and exchanging female kisses! (Betty, hand me my fan!) Well, let either have one bonnet or one lover more than the other—or, if they are blue stockings, let either be one round the higher on Fame’s ladder—bodkins and darning needles! what a tempest! Caps and characters in such a case are of no account at all. Oh, there never should be but one woman alive at a time. Then the fighting would be all where it belongs—in the masculine camp. What a time there’d be, |